Capture (38 page)

“
You know, I was just standing here thinking...well, thinking some not nice thoughts, to be honest. You see, someone I love very much became one of the newest patients at the infirmary today. She’s better now, as you can all see for yourself. But just the thought of her being hurt... Well, I won’t lie. I’d like to see some hard justice done just as much as everyone else here.”

Tarah touched my back between my shoulder blades, as if to calm me.
And her touch did ground me as always. But this time the effect wasn’t necessary. I cleared my throat, unsure as always as to what I should say. But suddenly, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a carefully prepared speech. Maybe being a good leader started with leading from the heart and honesty. And if I spoke what I was really thinking and feeling, then I didn’t have to have just the right words to say all figured out ahead of time.

“
But the truth is, it’s not just about who got sick, and who was most afraid for our loved ones,” I continued. “Because there’s someone else here that none of us have been considering much. His daughter.” I nodded at Cassie, who turned and frowned in obvious fear of the crowd. “See, she knows what her daddy did was wrong. But she also loves him, same as we all probably love, or once loved, our parents. And as much as you and I would all like to see some old fashioned justice enacted here tonight, maybe we should also be thinking about her. And our own kids, and the future generations who’ll grow up here. And what kind of history we want to create here tonight. And the kind of story we want to pass down to those future generations.

“
Why did we come here in the first place? Because the rest of the world is afraid of us. And because they’re thinking from a place of fear and darkness, they can’t see us clearly anymore. They can’t see with their hearts that we’re still the same people we were before all this normal people versus Clann business got started. They’re just acting out of fear.

“
And right here, right now, we’re tempted to do the exact same thing. We’ve all been afraid for weeks now, afraid we or someone we love would get sick and die. Now that we know the cause of that fear, we want to lash out, to take out our anger and fear on him. But if we do that, we become just like them.” I gestured in the direction of the main road, hidden by our protective ring of forest. “We’ll just be letting fear and anger and hatred eat us up from the inside out before we even gave this village a real chance to get off the ground.”

“
What are you saying?” someone yelled. “Are you saying we should just forget what Steve did and let him go?”

I took a deep breath and shrugged, reminding myself that I didn’t have to have all the answers here.
“I’m not saying that. Personally, it’d be pretty hard for me to have to walk by him day in and day out and not give in to the urge to at least take a shot at him. All I’m saying is to try and think from your heart, not about what you personally want, but about what’s good for everyone in the community. Including Cassie, and Pamela, and the families of those who died, and everyone else.” I paused, considering, then understood. “It’s like healing someone. You’ve got to let go of yourself, of what you personally want. Only then can the healing begin, for each of us individually and for our community as a whole.”

Tarah leaned against my back, wrapping her arms around my waist.
And that was the single best feedback on how I was doing that I could ever hope to receive.

Seeing the thoughtful looks on everyone’s faces now, instead of the fear and anger that had burned there before, I finally took a deep breath and turned back toward my house and my girl.

“Nice speech,” she whispered. “But you’re turning into a politician; you already talk too much. Shut up and kiss me already.”

“
Yes ma’am.” I bent my head and kissed her. And just like that, I was whole again.

A sudden wolf whistle pierced the kiss-induced fog, and I realized we had an audience.

“Get a room!” someone howled amid more than a few chuckles.

“
Can’t you see? He already built one!” someone else called out to even more laughter.

Tarah laughed against my lips, and I had to grin.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Welcome to the public life of a leader.” I turned, blocking their view of Tarah with my body. “Now why would I need a room when I built a whole house?”

“
You call that thing a house?” Mike shouted. “It’s nothing but a glorified shack on wheels.”

More laughter from the village.

And that’s when I knew that whatever the village decided tonight, it would be all right. Because even after weeks of fear, and running, and so many lives that had hung in the balance, we could all still joke and laugh together. We would survive this.

But I also knew that the quicker we could make our first decision as a community, the sooner we could get on with turning this place into what it could become...a place of dreams and legends.

“Well? Have y’all decided yet what to do with Steve there?” I asked, staying on the porch on purpose now to show the decision was up to them, not me.

The huddle of informal jurors grew tighter for a minute, then broke up.

Pamela slowly climbed the steps back up onto the infirmary’s porch and to Cassie’s side.
She waited until she stood behind her daughter, her hands wrapped in comfort around the girl’s shoulders, before she lifted her chin and spoke.

“
We’ve reached a decision. Steve, your punishment is to be sent from this place, banished forever from our village. Before you will be sent away, you will be marked with a permanent tattoo containing a spell binding you from ever revealing the location of this village.” Pamela swallowed, finally looking her husband in the eye. “You may never return.”

The crowd surged forward,
a hundred hands reaching for Steve. A blade glinted in the light from the porches and windows, and I started forward, thinking they were going to kill him after all. But then I saw the red string fall away and realized they’d only cut the yarn from around him.

Steve was resolute, accepting his punishment in silence, which seemed to keep things relatively calm.
He walked down the steps off the porch, and Pamela guided the village into a giant, rough circle around him. Some merely watched; others actively chanted with her as she mixed herbs then applied them in a small tattoo of some kind behind Steve’s right ear.

It was only when the crowd moved forward to take Steve away that he became visibly upset again, fighting for the chance to hug his daughter goodbye.
Pamela hesitated then hugged him too, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek before the villagers swept him down the stump-littered avenue between the houses, past my house where Tarah and I had stood watching it all, and down the village road.

At the end of it, the villagers stopped and Steve continued on alone, a solitary figure, shoulders rounded in defeat as he walked through the moonlight towards the nearest town.
Part of me wondered if we had all done the right thing. What if Steve somehow found a way to beat the binding spell and tell others where we were?

But I also knew the reality of our situation here...we would always run the risk of discovery.
All we could do was try to keep our village as well hidden from the rest of the world as we could.

Which was why our second act as a community was for Mike to teach several others how to help him put up a
shielding spell that deflected intruders and cloaked our village with the semblance of unbroken trees and treetops all around and above us. From that moment on, Mike and his aides worked in shifts to maintain the shield’s spell, becoming our village’s first official Guardians.

Once the shield was in place, I ventured out and up the nearest mountainside for a few minutes in the moonlight to make sure we were truly hidden.
The shield was an amazing creation, completely hiding the clearing from view. From outside its boundaries, our land looked untouched for decades, nothing more than a thick forest that swayed correctly in both the gentlest of breezes and the strongest of winds that I could conjure up.

For now, we were safe.

That night, the village threw its first New Year’s Eve party, not just to celebrate the end of probably the hardest year any of us had ever known and the beginning of a new year, but also to celebrate life and hope, remembering and honoring the dead, and sealing the communal bond that kicking out Steve and creating our village’s protective shield had started. Our village had been tested and tried, challenged in ways both envisioned and unforeseen, and yet we’d emerged as survivors with a true appreciation for freedom, family, safety, and love.

As for Tarah and me, we spent the night in a much quieter way, asleep in each others’ arms and thankful for life itself.
And that was more than enough celebration for us.

THE END

O
ut now from Harlequin Teen in multiple languages in both print and ebook formats in Melissa Darnell’s Clann Series:

Savannah Colbert has never known why she's so hated by the kids of the Clann. Nor can she deny her instinct to get close to Clann golden boy Tristan Coleman. Especially when she recovers from a strange illness and the attraction becomes nearly irresistible. It's as if he's a magnet, pulling her gaze, her thoughts, even her dreams. Her family has warned her to have nothing to do with him, or any members of the Clann. But when Tristan is suddenly everywhere she goes, Savannah fears she's destined to fail.

For years, Tristan has been forbidden to even speak to Savannah Colbert. Then Savannah disappears from school for a week and comes back…different, and suddenly he can't stay away. Boys seem intoxicated just from looking at her. His own family becomes stricter than ever. And Tristan has to fight his own urge to protect her, to be near her no matter the consequences….

Read their sample chapters, playlists, and more at
www.MelissaDarnell.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa Darnell is the author of a growing list of adult, New Adult, and YA fiction and nonfiction books. Born in California, she grew up in East Texas, and as an adult has also called the following states home since then: Utah, West Virginia, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Dakota. She currently lives in northeastern Nebraska with her awesome husband Tim and two amazingly cool children, Hunter and Alexander, where she enjoys watching TV shows as diverse as Newsroom, Being Human, Defiance, Game of Thrones, and True Blood, and of course writing her next book. Visit her website at
www.MelissaDarnell.com
for news about her upcoming books, author’s notes about some of her novels, online playlists for each of her books, and more!